Joy Is My Middle Name documents crawling through your twenties and emerging into your thirties. Walking uneasy cities and rural towns, talking about sex, race, womanhood, addiction, sobriety, consumerism and pop culture, these poems pull at the edges of the performed self with conversational ease.
Humble, giddy, bold, empathetic, subversive, hilarious, lithe – the collection feels like a conversation with your greatest friend, over the best dinner. Full of stories, character, awkward silence, relatable sentiment; the buzz of perfect moments are funnelled onto the page.
BIO
Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Yale Review. She was the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and is currently a creative writing fellow at Emory University. She lives in Decatur, Georgia.
REVIEWS
New Yorker Books of the Year 2025
‘Sexy and exciting, they read like riffs and mug like rants: but, as this brainy poet grapples middle-class mores to the ground, they can also be extremely funny.’ -- Fiona Sampson, Guardian
‘Joy Is My Middle Name is a magnificent, radical debut from a bold and exciting new voice … at turns hilarious, heartbreaking, subversive, courageous and eye-opening. Debevec-McKenney has the uncanny ability to make the reader feel like they are experiencing first-hand the brilliantly chaotic and profoundly intelligent process of a writer at work, such is the generosity of spirit, unmatched ambition and exceptional skill of a poet who explores femininity, sex, race, addiction, capitalism and pop culture through a buzzy, boisterous, brilliant lens that wants you to see and celebrate that, despite it all, in spite of ourselves, “Tangerine is finally in! Joy is in! Let it in!” The quotidian and the historic, the personal and the political, interior and external experience, co-exist awkwardly and perfectly in this inspiring patchwork.’ -- Poetry Book Society
‘The voice in this book is truly distinct: sardonic, hyper-aware and often razor-sharp. There’s the observational zing of Frank O’Hara at times, but with an edge that’s thoroughly contemporary and unapologetically personal…. The poet’s casual tone is revealed as a disguise, because these are in fact highly considered, layered and precisely built poems. They confidently contain the seeming meander of the speaker’s mind, but they are very cleverly wrought. Reading this book, for me, felt like sitting next to someone smart and brilliant at a party who pretends not to care if you’re listening – but, you just can’t stop yourself from doing so. The “joy” here is palpable, and it belongs to the reader as well as the writer.’ -- Mab Jones, Buzz Mag
‘Joy Is My Middle Name begins with a “Cento for the Night I Tried Stand-Up,” a versified collage of lines by several dozen comedians. The poem’s funny, several times over – thanks to the lines themselves and the full routines they recall, to the chains of non sequiturs and shuffled-together contexts bridging them…. In the distances between things and the stories we tell about them – between her multidimensional self and her stand-up-inspired personae, between historical accuracy and overblown American myths – Debevec-McKenney finds her peculiar combination of ironic remove and fond humour.’ -- Christopher Spaide, LitHub
[H] W. W. Norton & Company / August 05, 2025
0.56" H x 8.44" L x 6.34" W (0.63 lbs) 120 pages
